Richard Lambert at the CBI had a letter in the FT this week in response to their first rate editorial on tax shortly before Christmas. He said: Your editorial “A taxing world” (December 22) made the startling comment that the payment of corporate tax has been turned “largely into a voluntary gesture by the well-run
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Paul Mason of NewsNight has been pretty audacious in his forecasts for 2011. He ahs 10, all worth reading. Here are two I like: A rash of Labour-aligned think-tanks will appear Labour has learned that it lost the intellectual battle while in office to think tanks on the fringes of Conservatism – the Taxpayers Alliance,
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I am still technically on holiday, and admit to be really enjoying the break, but it is normal to review the year gone by and to look forward to the next. What have the successes of 2010 been? There have been lots: Country-by-country reporting has been the subject of three international reviews – by the
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The Guardian notes that the French president is a man with ambitions for 2011: Sarkozy’s leadership of the G8′s six western powers and Russia and China, as well as his rotating presidency of the G20 forum of the largest economies, will focus on his ambitious plans to overhaul the financial system. He wants a new
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Bloomberg have produced another of Jesse Drucker’s stunning reports on tax avoidance in the last couple of days. This one is wholly US focussed, but has a strong offshore element and a much broader appeal than the US market because it shows two key things. First that business is still demanding tax favours, even when
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More good argument on the right direction for tax reform, this time from William Brittain-Catlin in the Guardian: Governments of progressive nations should leave offshore tax havens and their clients to their own devices, and instead boldly declare that they will refuse to have on their soil any corporation, individual, financial entity or transaction that
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The FT has got on the right track again in an article today that says: The depth of the recent financial crisis was largely due to excessively high leverage, or debt-to-equity ratios. Both banks and corporates were heavily indebted at the onset of the financial crisis as low interest rates promoted cheap debt financing. But
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Jesse Drucker of Bloomberg made the “Dutch Sandwich” famous this year when writing about Google’s tax. Last evening he drew this to my attention:   That pretty much says it all about corporate tax avoidance of this sort.

The Tax Justice Network is, apparently, getting lots of messages of interest about joining. So it ha produced a guide for those who want to know how to and what it means. It’s here for those interested.